Meghalaya Sketchbook

The Meghalaya sketchbook is inspired myths, traditions and everyday stories I collected and recorded during a month living amongst the Khasi tribe in the Khasi Hills of Meghalaya, a remote area in Northeast India.

The Khasi of Meghalaya in Northeast India are a matrilineal tribe, which means that women own all property and pass their surnames to their children, while husbands move to the wife's household after marriage. The Kadduh, the youngest daughter of the family, will inherit all property, take care of her parents and continue the family line.

This, together with their vivid cultural heritage of myths and traditions makes the Khasi Hills a dreamy and magical place where time seems to have stopped but which, at the same time, is the home of a society which is surprisingly modern and equal.

The Meghalaya sketchbook, documenting one month of living in the Khasi Hills, is full of fascinating stories from Khasi culture – age-old myths of snake goddesses and other mythical creatures, funny jungle stories. It tells about the witnessing of complicated animist sacrificial rituals, wandering through sacred forests, listening to life stories in gloomy teahouses, everyday absurdities of India – and how it is to life in a country where women rule.

Pink Matryoskha

Label for a fine organic Austrian vodka – coming soon!

Fillas de la Riba Daughters of the River

Fillas de la Riba is a network of monochrome wallpaintings on old wooden doors spread about the old town and surrounding streets in Riba Roja d’Ebre, a small rural village in Catalonia, Spain. It’s a playful reflection on Riba-Roja’s past, inspired by old photographs of Riba residents in traditional clothes, ancient juniper production, the river Ebre and stories from the remarkable life of Teresa Aguilà Garcia, an illustrious resident of Riba-Roja.

Riba de Ginebre | Juniper River

This door is inspired by the juniper ovens. Some years ago a group around Josep Aguilà, following the reports of very old people, rediscovered seventeen juniper ovens around the village, dome shaped stone-ovens where people used to make juniper oil.

Filla de la Riba

Filla de la Riba, daughter of the River, gave name to the art project I was working on here at Riu'd Art Residency in Riba-roja d‘Ebre, Catalonia.

She was inspired by old photographs of village residents from the beginning of the last century.

La Sirena | Stories from the River

The village of Riba-roja d’Ebre is situated in a loop of the river Ebre, and before there were trains, people used boats to transport goods.

The first story I heard about the river was from a man named Paquito who told me that once there was a man who shipwrecked, couldn’t not swim and saved himself by holding onto a ram’s tail.

Josep Aguilà in turn told me that until the 1920, hundreds of ships would pass the village every day. Some villages next to the river even charged tolls. Downwards the ships would swim with the stream, and upwards with sails or with the help of horses or mules who would pull the ship with a rope from the shore, helped by men with oars inside the boats.

In these days, as there was no running water, women had to go to wash at the river, amongst them Teresa Aguilà. Ships would pass by, and the boat men on the ships would give them compliments, some more elegant than others.

Sometimes words with double senses were exchanged between the boat men and the laundresses. The men would ask them about the state of wetness, pretending to mean the river but meaning something else, and the women would ask whether it was hard and long, pretending to mean the oar but actually meaning something else…

Roses for Rosita

During my stay at Riba-roja d'Ebre, of course I soon had noticed and admired the hundreds of beautiful pot plants that were placed in every corner of the village. Riba-roja is, like many spanish villages, in a severe state of decay that is less romantic than saddening. Especially the beautiful old town of Riba-roja was really desolate, with crumbled walls and ruins where once beautiful houses had been.

The pot plants, lush and green, were decorativley placed in door cases, walls and along the narrow streets and conveyed the comforting feeling that old Riba-roja had not yet been left to its fate. It showed that there still existed some love and care for this old place. It seemed a bit like fairy magic.

There was definitely a good spirit at work, and on the last day before the presentation of the artworks I got to meet the good spirit. She entered the bar where we would have lunch and gifted us with some of her handmade tote bags, just like that. I had never seen her before.

Her name was Rosita, and she told me that after her husband had died she had gone to the mayor and suggested him that if he would pay for it she would decorate the village with pot plants and take care of them. And so she did.

And so I painted some pot plants for Rosita.

Teresa and the wolf

This door painting is about Teresa Aguilà, grandmother of Josep Aguilà, who told me many stories about her during my stay at Riba-roja d’Ebre.

This is the story of Teresa and the wolf as told by Josep.

Teresa Aguilà was born in Riba-roja d’Ebre in the year 1895 and she lived to be 105.

When she was seven, both of her parents died within a week and she went to stay with an aunt who was very poor. So little Teresa, at the age of seven, had to begin to work as an employee in the house of rich people. She worked throughout her childhood and youth, for which she did not even get any payment, only food. She washed clothes, cleaned houses, worked on the field and in the kitchen. Of course, she did not have time to school. But when she was fourteen, she decided to pay a tutor to visit her for an hour every night and teach her how to read, to write and basic mathematics. Teresa read the newspaper every day up to the age of 103, even picked it up herself, at the age of 104 she still looked at the photos and the headlines.

And here comes the incredible story of Teresa and the wolf: When Teresa was 12 or 13, she worked at a finca, a farm three hours away from the village. Every week she had to go and get food for the workers from the village, alone, only accompanied by two mules. She was woken up at 3 in the night, and at 4 her journey began. One night, on her way from the farm to the village, she noticed that there were wolves behind her, coming closer and closer. Terribly scared, she thought how she could save herself. Finally, she took a long rope, tied one end to the saddle and let the other end fall to the ground, and moving the rope she stirred up dust, which frightended the wolves, and they dissappeared.

When she would arrive in the village, the people who prepared the food would force her to attend mass. They would not give her anything to eat, neither before nor after mass. To check whether she actually had attended mass, they used to ask her which priest was holding the mass and what the color of his robe was.

But Teresa, who was as starving as smart, would go to the church, check out the priest and his robe and then go straight back to the house, where she sneaked into the hen house and stole two or three freshly laid eggs, which she ate raw. On the way back, when she was out of sight of the village, she stopped the mules and took a bit of bread and sausage and finally had something proper to eat.

More stories about Teresa:

Teresa and the hunger

When Teresa Aguilà was 17 years old, one of the extra works she did was something called “espigolar”. Around her village there were many olive fincas, and “espigolar” meant to go to the owner after the harvest was done and ask for permission to pick the last few overlooked olives.

It meant looking for olives on the fields after there were practically none left, there were so little olives left that it was not worth the work, almost absurd to do it, and only very poor people would do it.

At night, after a hard day of work, Teresa and her friend Rosita, would go to “espigolar” to a finca where they had gotten permission to do so. After two or three days of work they collected a ridiculously little amount of olives. But then they realized that on the way to the finca there were some fincas where the olives had not been harvested yet, and every day when they would pass by they would pick two, three kilos from those trees without permission, which was much more than they could ever had picked doing “espigolar”.

They sold these stolen olives and then Teresa said to her friend: What do you think of buying a tupi (a ceramic pot) with the money? So every day we could buy some beans or chickpeas and prepare some nice food.

This is, in the words of Josep Aguilà, who told me this story, the spirit of survival. Had they been caught, they would have been physically punished or would have ended up in prison.

This gives you an idea of the bitter poverty Teresa suffered from. But it was even worse. After I told the story to the other artists of the residency, the organizers of the residency told me that when they told Josep about some found some strange looking rodent they had found on their olive farm, Josep would say: My grandmother used to eat that!

Teresa and the dictator

This is the last and the certainly the most haunting story of the life of Teresa Aguilà.As you already know, Teresa had to fight many wolves in her life, but the biggest one was Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator, and the regime he embodied.

Here is the story as it was told to me by Josep Aguilà, the grandson of Teresa.

Teresa, who was called Tereseta by her friends, or even Teresó (a male sounding version of her name), lived in a time where women faced even more discrimination than today. 90 years ago in Spain, women were mostly locked up in their houses and were not really able to connect with people or surroundings outside their families.

As you already know, Teresa was very poor and could not go to University, but she was very aware and critical of the power the rich people and the ways they abused poor people, especially women. Women not only earnt less than men, often they did not get any money for work at all and were frequently sexually abused.

Teresa herself had to work with an army captain in Reus, the next bigger city, as a maid and taking care of the child you see in the picture. She also had to work in different villages helping in the olive and hazelnut harvest, and sometimes she visited her brother in Barcelona working with him in the coal mines in Figol near the Pyrenees.

So she would often get out of her village, and she would adquire her knowledge not at the university but on her trips. This also added to the fact that Teresa was more open-minded than the other women in her village. She also liked to talk with men about everything around the work on the fields, she knew all the works perfectly well, the seedtimes, the influences of the moon, and she knew everything about plants and trees – in short, she knew things that the average woman did not know, who would only help on the fields but would not be interested in her work further.

Teresa also loved talking about politics with men during reunions that took place mostly between 1930-36 and of which many were secret, because these reunions were prohibited.She was lucky to have a husband who trusted her and did not harass her for meeting other men at these reunions. After the reunions, Teresa would go and explain everything to the women of the village, visiting each of them individually in their own house.

Many people would later tell Josep that Teresa was ahead her time. She had a very open mind, was feminist and leftist, without being extreme.

On the 14th of april, 1933, a clock was put in the clocktower of the church from the Republic (the Republicans was the democratically elected spanish government that later would be overturned by the later dictator Francisco Franco by a coup d’etat), and Teresa and a group of other women participated in the celebration. There is even a photograph Josep showed me from that day with Teresa carrying a republican flag.

The Spanish civil war (or rather the Spanish “uncivil” war, as Josep calls it) ended in 1939. Many Republicans were imprisoned and executed, and many others fled either to other countries or places inside of Spain where nobody would know them to avoid persecution from the Franquistas. Teresa moved to Barcelona with her husband and daughter, where she would work in a farm house of a Franquist owner who did not care about their political views. Then, in 1940 Teresa decided to visit her village for some days, against all advice of family and friends who had come together at a family reunion to discuss the matter. On the way to Riba-roja with her daughter, she met some people from her village who warned her to go to the village and told her to return immediately, because it was too dangerous. But Teresa told them that she had no reason to be afraid because she did not collaborated in the death of anybody, on the contrary, she had even defended saved a Franquists from execution and therefor certainly nobody would harm her.

The man she had saved had been a widower with two daugthers and the Republians were planing to execute him and Teresa, who had been an orphan herself, convinced them that it was a great injustice to turn these two little girls into orphans. Thanks to Teresa, the man was set free.

On the second day in her village, she was arrested, following a triple denunciation. Three “brave” men seized her at her house, beat her up and kicked her, threw stones at her, spat at her and shaved her head. It was so horrible that the memory of the incident makes Joseps mother-in-law with her 96 years still trembling with terror.

They put her in the local prison (a building which still exists today and still looks like a prison, but is not used anymore) held a propaganda trial and accused her of “helping the rebellion”, ignoring the fact that the rebell had been Franco, and Teresa had never carried a weapon or harmed anybody. She was sentenced to 15 years of prison just because she had carried the Republican flag in 1933 and because she had been heard speaking about politics.

Of these 15 years she spent four and a half years in prison in Barcelona, in a prison that once had been a convent and which now is a shopping center. What happened to Teresa happened to thousands of Republican women – 40.000 women went through that prison and now only a small plaquette (two millimeters of memory for each of them, says Josep) reminds of these women who’s only crime it was to be Republican.

Inside the prison, Teresa secretly made herself a ring from some silver coins her daughter, who walked many days to see her in prison, brought her, engraved with the initials of her husband, J.A. for Josep Alabart (which now happen to be the initials of Josep Aguilà) and herself, T.A. for Teresa Aguilà.

In the prison, they tried to brainwash them, telling them that they were demons, that the civil war had been their fault, and that they were useless and unwanted by everybody outside and that the world continued better without them. Many were raped by men as well as by women, which the prisoners were pressured to tolerate without resistance in order to get some benefits like more food or more free time.

Thanks to her ingeniuity, Teresa managed to push herself through prison. But when she came out of prison, she was a different woman. Four and a half years of prison had changed this woman who had been so alive, so happy, so talkative, so intelligent. The woman who returned from prison was scared and dumb and almost speechless, although judging from the photos I saw of her at old age she seemed to have gotten her old self back after time. What had happened during these four years of prison that a person like Teresa would come out of it so scared?

When Teresa’s husband learnt that they had imprisoned his wife, he did not understand, repeating “this is not possible, she was such a good woman, she didn’t harm anybody…” He was so shocked about the unbelievable and went crazy over the loss that he had to stay at a psychiatry for some months. When he was well again, he went back to work on the farm near Barcelona.

Teresa and her daughter, Josep’s mother, would later educate him “badly”, as Franquist, in order to protect him (the Franco regime would continue until 1977). But then again, they educated him well enough that he began to see how things were by himself, and then they talked openly and in detail to him about everything.

I met Josep Aguilà on my first three days of Riu’d Art artist residency, a lively, quick-witted and warm-hearted man overflowing with knowledge and a contagious enthusiasm for many issues. This remarkable man owning so much brain, heart and wit in retrospective gives me an idea of how the personality of his grandmother Teresa might have been.

During the daytime he, together with the organizors of the residency, would lead us around the hills surrounding the village, the dam, the hermitage and one of the juniper ovens he had discovered, answered all of our questions and generously sharing his abundant knowledge with us. During the night, he invited us artists to his “Bar Josep”, which would consist of a huge table dragged out on the street in front of his house, where he would serve us delicious craft beer and cheese and good, fun conversation.

When I told him that I wanted to hear all the stories of the village, he told me the story of his grandmother and the wolf. Then he had to travel back to Barcelona, but during my whole stay in the village he kept emailing me stories of his grandmother and stories from the village. Yesterday he wrote me a mail where he explained the story of Teresa and the civil war, which he had told me before, in more detail. So now I can share it with you.

Thank you Josep for sharing these deeply moving stories of Teresa with me and for giving first context and then sense to my artistic stay and work in Riba-roja, where I tried to create some humble memorial for Teresa, knowing that tens of thousands of door paintings would not be enough to adequately remind of and honor Teresa and the other brave Republican Catalan women who were attacked, wounded and killed fighting the horrible beasts of Franco. Hopefully one day these women will get the memorial they deserve.

Riba de Jinebre (Juniper River)

Filla de la Riba (Daughter of the river)

Filla de la Riba

La Sirena (the mermaid)

La Sirena (the mermaid)

La Sirena (the mermaid)

Painting La sirena

La Sirena (the mermaid)

Roses for Rosita

Roses for Rosita

Teresa and the wolf

Teresa Aguilà

Group picture with wolf

Im Tal der Alfenz

“Im Tal der Alfenz – Geschichten und Bilder vom Klostertal” - a very special book about the Klostertal (a valley in Western Austria).

MINISUTRA!

MINISUTRA is a big, colorful, and at times queer circus of sex and fun, consisting of 34 funny sex positions you may or may not want to try at home, such as the “jealous frog position” or the “love orchestra”.

MINISUTRA is inspired by this classical, precolonial indian erotic culture in which the kamasutra, an ancient Indian text about the art of love, originates, a culture which was, compared to our sterile, commercialized and often misogynist mainstream sexual culture – manifold, vivid, sensual, relaxed and playful.

MINISUTRA has been written about in VICE magazine, The HuffPost and Harper‘s Bazaar India.

Hardcover10x12 cmPrinted in Austria. 2018 self published with the kind support of the crowd and bildrecht.at

Donauinsel | Danube Island

A really long illustrated map for the really long Danube Island in Vienna, Austria.

Client: Stadtzeitung Falter, Vienna.

Embroideries: Interactive touch wall

Interactive touchwall for an exhibition Stadtmuseum Dornbirn about the women working in the western Austrian and Swiss textile industries from home some decades ago.

The touchwall illustrates the production cycle of embroideries and laces from the factory’s delivery to the home worker to the international export as pieces of underwear. All the scenes are connected with a red thread.

If visitors touch the illustrations on the wall, details of light will “magically” appear on them and turn the illustrations into interactive ones – embroideries will be lit up in the hands of a woman, or a messenger boy will all of a sudden ride on a glowing bicycle.

Video: Interactive Touchwall in Dornbirn, Austria

Children in Vienna 2018

Illustrations for the new Kind in Wien – a children’s guide to Vienna.

Still Life

Stillleben / Still life (a play on words meaning "still life" but also "a life of breastfeeding".

Illustration for a review of Antonia Baums book "Stilleben", about a young modern woman who's life is turned into a state of isolation and inertia after having her baby. Published by Stadtzeitung Falter, Vienna.

stepmothers

Illustration for an article about stepmothers.Published in Stadtzeitung Falter, Vienna.

Tehran sketchbook

Some pages from my sketchbook from Tehran, 2016.

Also including a bit of Shiraz, some islands in the Persian Gulf, Belgrade and Edinburgh.

Integration

INTEGRATION.

Illustration for a newspaper article about refugees' new lives in Vienna. For Stadtzeitung Falter, Vienna.

the seventeenth summer

Two illustrations for a book review of "The Seventeenth Summer" by "Maureen Daly". I chose the yellow one to use for publication. Published by Stadtzeitung Falter, Vienna.

Austrian Alps

Illustrated map of Vorarlberg, Western Austria, for the application for nomination as European Capital of Culture

Client: Federal Government of Vorarlberg, Austria

Children and Death

Illustration for an article about children and their different approaches to death. For Stadtzeitung Falter, Vienna.

Children in Vienna

Illustrations for KIND IN WIEN, a guide to Vienna designed parents and people who work with children.

Published by Falter Verlag, Vienna, in 2017.

tropicarium

TROPICARIUM. Solo exhibition at the National Scientific Library of Tbilisi in cooperation with the Book Art Center Tbilisi.

I discovered a somewhat mysterious space full of plants hidden on the deserted top floor of the huge communist-era building of the Scientific Library of Tbilisi and decided that it would be fun to exhibit my prints in a pot plant jungle, so I took it over.

TROPICARIUM consists of prints, plates and an spontaneous installation called "Birds and bees" diverting some old library card catalogues from their intented use, all set in a jungle of pot plants.

Lake city

Lake City is a 2.5m long ink drawing which was created during a two months long artist residency in Udaipur, Rajahstan, India, during spring 2017.

Udaipur, also called Lake City and known as the “Venice of the East”, is considered one of the most beautiful cities of India. It is so beautiful that many bollywood stars choose to have their wedding there.

Udaipur is a fairytale city full of georgeous palaces, a labyrinth of lakes and bridges and millions of intricate alleyways leading to mysterious temples.

Lake city was created while exploring the city and directly drawn in the streets of Udaipur during many, many hours. It is a multispatial tour through the city and documents things seen, experienced, memorized and fantasized in an surreal city.

The drawn panorama of the city begins with a (drawing) self portrait in an arcade of Ganghaur Ghat and then meanders around the magical lakescapes of Pichola Lake and Fateh Sagar Lake with its fantastic palaces, temples and gardens as well as the winding alleys of the old town with its many shrines, tiny tea stalls and open fires.

The drawing might seem to depict an imaginary place, but it contains just as many real as fantastic elements – it blurs the line between imagination and reality and thus reproduces the feeling one gets while strolling through Udaipur.

The drawing Lake City is the attempt to capture the overwhelming surreality and beauty of a city with its people, gods and animals. Palaces swimming on lakes, goddesses showing their tongues, women floating on the water riding on swans and horses disguised as baby elephants – all these are images found in Udaipur and become part of a fantastic portrait of the spirit of the city.

dinosaurs and stars

This is a series of small aluminum aquatint etchings I made in the summer of 2017 at Alfara Studio, Salamanca.

Lichtspiele am Dach

What is Feminism?

Illustrations for the feminism special of Stadtzeitung Falter, Vienna.

Feminists

The different kinds of feminists and "feminists"* in different eras. Illustration for Stadtzeitung Falter, Vienna.

*A woman who submits herself strictly and uncritically to a sexist dress code of a misogynist ideology is, by definition, not a feminist.

Violence in the internet

Illustration about sexualized verbal violence women are facing in the internet – and how this phenomenon is related to the influence of mainstream pornography on boys and men and the fact that already 40% (and rising) of all pornograpic content has more to do with violence against women than with lust and fun.

Feminism and families

Why does mum have to dress her four kids alone while dad (does he even deserve the name?) is busy with facebook? Why is raising kids and housework still seen as a women‘s thing?

SAVARI – an illustrated journey through Iran & India

SAVARI – an illustrated journey through Iran & India (travelbook)

SAVARI is a collection of drawings from my sketchbook from five months of Iran & India. It‘s a travelogue full of drawings, sketches, poems and notes, capturing my day-to-day adventures in a strange world, telling stories about operated noses in Iran, baking cakes in Shiraz, harvesting pomegranates in Iranian villages, encounters with strangers in fairytale-like mosques and drinking whiskey in the Indian jungle. Half imaginary, half real, it‘s a many-layered documentation of a personal story in the form of a journey. At the same time, it tells about the political circumstances and the cultural environment in which the journey takes place, always oscillating between reality and fantasy.

The story behind SAVARI:

In October 2014, I traveled through Iran for one month with the mission to fill up my sketchbook with impressions and stories that would capture the spirit of a mysterious and magical country. I wanted to seek inspiration in its fascinating culture that goes back thousands of years, and at the same time explore a country that nowadays is regarded with much controversy and prejudice. It turned out to be the most ambivalent journey I had ever taken: As a woman who was traveling alone, I experienced many difficulties and even threatening situations. But soon, I found myself in a fascinating world full of architecture and art so stunningly beautiful that I could not take my eyes off of it; What I found in Iran seemed different from everything else I had seen before: It was a world full of beauty, art and poetry, where old persian poets are still worshipped, and where people actually enjoy reciting poetry on every occasion. A world full of magic and inspiration, full of mystery and beauty, inhabited by the most hospitable and refined people I had ever met. It was something I could not have imagined actually existed before. It was a world that profoundly touched me.

There was inspiration everywhere. I sketched in tea houses, in rose gardens, in mosques, in courtyards, on bazaars, sitting on the kitchen floors of new friends.

And while the story of my journey evolved in my sketchbook, I was fascinated with how much interest my book aroused amongst the people I met there, how they carefully leafed through it, how thoroughly they studied every single page, and how thoughtfully they commented on it, and the enthusiasm with which they told other people about it, and how delighted they were when they finally became part of the book themselves.It was kind of a singular experience. My book became everybody’s book. It went through so many hands, connected me with so many people, and this is one of the most beautiful memories I have about Iran. This is why it makes sense for me to make art.I continued to sketch about my journey when I moved on to India, finding plenty of new inspiration between the jungle and the sea.

Afghan refugees

Illustration for a cover story about a new study investigating Afghan men‘s history of exposure to violence (which sadly applies to literally every single Afghan person) and their archaic perception of women.

Client: Stadtzeitung Falter, Vienna

Interactive Touchwall

Interactive Illustration: If you touch the illustration on the wall, drawings made of light appear and make little stories happen.

This touchwall is part of the exhibition Niederösterreichische Landesausstellung 2017 in beautiful Pöggstall castle in Lower Austria.

Happy Nowrooz

Norooz is the Iranian new year. This drawing features the Haft-Seen, seven symbolic items beginning with the Persian letter seen (س) for s, that are traditionally displayed on tables during Norooz: Vinegar, olive, apple, sumac fruit, grain sprouts and wheat pudding.

Polyamory

Social report

Illustrations for a publication of a summarized

version of the Austrian Sozialreport (social report). Client: Falter Verlag

Children & ADHD

A series of illustrations for an article and interview about ADHD with children.

Green is good

Made for the annually "Fair issue" of Stadtzeitung Falter, Vienna, Austria.

Drawing in the theatre

These watercolor and ink drawings were made on stage as part of a theatre play about starving artists, "Wir Hungerkünstlerinnen. Wir Hungerkünstler" by Jakub Kavin at Theater Brett, Vienna.

This body of work does not only add another dimension of the theatre play by creating new artworks born out of different compositions of scenes, characters and text, but also is a very unusual documentation for the audience and the actresses and actors. A fun & unique experience!

Little ink drawings

Personal work / watercolor and ink.

Happy holidays

Illustration for an article about making holidays fun for both parents and children.

Client: Stadtzeitung Falter, Vienna.

Epigrammatica Granadina

Epigrammatica Granadina is an art intervention, mapping, poetry, and illustration project, created in Granada, Spain.

This project takes place in the the moorish old town of Granada, Andalusia, Southern Spain, whose moorish heritage still has a strong presence with the Alhambra, the red castle, towering over the city, and the labyrinth like Albaícin, Granadas old town, with with its winding alleys, its white washed houses and beautiful gardens still maintains a oriental atmosphere of supernatural beauty.

Epigrammatica Granadina consists of series of 24 ink drawn epigrams which were inspired by little discoveries in Granada: The epigramms are more or less puns and references on history, poetic and evocative street names, arab-andalusian poems, carmenes (the traditional moorish gardens), as well as interesting trivia and personal anecdotes.

The epigrams were hidden in the Albaícin and wait to be discovered by curious spectators who look closely: They will find in them words and riddles that are as playful, mysterious, ambigous as the Albaícin itself.

#4 Calle de la Estrella / Star street: The irony of the skies: I wanted to write a poem about the sky, but it has more stars than I have words.

#5 Calle de los Besos / Street of the kisses. En la calle de los besos te esperaba pero no viniste / en otras calles te perdiste (In the street the kisses I was waiting for you, but you didn’t come / you got lost in other streets) The Calle de los besos is named after a supposedly dead girl who after much mourning

Explaining porn to children

Map of Music

Illustrated map of music festivals in Austria for GEHÖRT, the magazine of the Austrian radio station Ö1.

Client: Ö1.

The adventures of Monella

Monella was born in an animation workshop in Macerata, Italy. Since then, she has been travelling the world with me!

Monella's first time at the beach, in beautiful Italy.

Hello world! Monella is born!

Monella as a fetus.

Monella's first selfie on the beach of Civitanova, Italy.

Monella's first train ride in Austria.

Monella in Málaga, shortly before capturing the Transmediterranea.

Monella as a gypsy in Granada, Andalucía.

Monella on the magical island of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf.

Monella chilling with Yin and Yang, two Persian kittens, in an Iranian mountain village.

Monella planning a journey to the east!

Monella in front of the archaeological museum of Athens, Greece.

Monella getting lost in the streets of Tehran.

Monella is the star of Tajrish bazaar in Tehran.

Monella with wooden pirate boat on the island of Quesm, Iran.

Monella at Schloss Hohensalzburg in Salzburg, Austria.

Monella picking this year's last flowers during a long walk along the Danube in the golden autumn light of Belgrade.

Monella hiking on the enchanted hills of Edinburgh.

A children‘s guide to Vienna

A children's guide to Vienna. 2016. This guide is divided into eleven chapters (such as nature, health, entertainment), each of which is introduced with an illustration.

Client: Falter Verlag.

Lady from a strange country

Watercolor and Ink.

Private work.

Climate change and flight

Illustrations for articles about climate change and flight and green money.

Client: Stadtzeitung Falter.

Private lessons

Client: Stadtzeitung Falter, Vienna

Expensive childcare

When women can‘t afford to go to work because childcare is too expensive.

Client: Stadtzeitung Falter, Vienna.

Mapping imaginary worlds

This series of aquatint etchings is an exploration and mapping of my inner landscapes, shaped by perception and memory and inspired by journeys through Uzbekistan, Israel, Jordan, and Spain.

These etchings are composed of personal stories and perceived images, all reflected against a background of history, mythology and poetry, thus linking the outside and the inside world. They are full of signs, hints and symbols referring to the settings and spaces of time I am moving in.

Every picture represents a small world – it is a visual narration, a mapping of the world as I see it, half autobiographical and half imaginary.

Inspired by journeys and other occurrences, they are like ephemeral captures from the stream of consciousness, like pictorial distills of life’s moments, of thoughts, feelings and atmospheres.

I try to visualize images as if they were poems, aiming to go beyond the depiction of only one single image at a time, but building multi-spatial structures by blending and connecting several impressions and images.

Dissolving the borders of space and time creates a simultaneousness of events which together form one big image – similar to the way our memory is shaped. Thus, I’m trying to approach the rather intangible nature of mental images and to translate them into a visually manifest form.

Paseo de los Tristes (Granada)

Sangüesa, Spain

Salamanca, Spain

Terra Sancta (Amman, Jerusalem, Petra)

Porto

Toronto city maps

Illustrated maps of different Toronto neighborhoods.

Client: Toronto Life Magazine.

Acrobats

Acrobats for an installation dedicated to the Austrian flyer/catcher acrobat Karl Zauser, part of the exhibition "ganznah" at Vorarlberg Museum, Bregenz, Austria.

(pencil drawing, print on adhesive foil)

Client: La

Art & Culture

Illustrations for the strategy paper of the department for culture and arts of the federal government of Vorarlberg, Austria.

Client: Federal government of Vorarlberg (Austria).

Persian etchings

Hardground and aquatint etchings based on my first Persian sketchbook, etched and printed during an artist residency in India in 2014.

The Intercontinental Rollercoaster Club

This is a documentary by A&Y about the Intercontinental Rollercoaster Club‘s adventures in India.

From Greece to Spain

Indigo linocuts inspired by Greece, printed in Salamanca.

Lithographies

Lithographies made at Fundación CIEC in Galicia, Spain.

A map of the world

Maps for the annual report 2014.

Client: BPCE.

Water and fire

Linocuts. Two colors on japanese paper.

2015.

The Invisible City of Oporto

The Invisible City is an art project on the crossroads of illustration, art intervention, street art and mapping, playing with the history, culture and cityscape of the city of Porto, Portugal.

The invisible city consists of a secret network of ten illustrations hidden on ten different locations in the streets of Porto, images that are mysteriously connected to their surroundings.

Part of the project is also a secret hand-drawn map printed in a limited edition and partly distributed by coincidence, which provides access to the network of images. Besides indicating the locations of the ten images, the map also gives informations on the meaning of the images and their secret messages, their connection to their environment or the history of Porto. Without the map, the images might be encountered accidentally, but they will remain remain undisclosed, and thus invisible, to the ordinary passer-by.

These secret maps (part of which were distributed by giving them to strangers or hiding them in Porto’s libraries and coffee houses) allows the owner to discover all parts of the Invisible City and experience an Oporto different from the one they thought they knew, for a city is never only one city, but merely a container for an infinite, ever-changing number of possible city versions, involving a varying degree of imagination and possibly having not much more in common than the fact that they exist simultaneously at the same place, bearing the same name.

The Invisible City is one of these versions – and, just like any other city being alive, it is of an ephemeral character and always subject to change.

Integration

Illustrations for a multi-page integration special.

Client: Stadtzeitung Falter, Vienna.

Like Astronauts in the sky: Single parents

Illustration for an article about the difficulties of being a single parent.

Client: Stadtzeitung Falter.

Carbon paper monotypes

Monotypes on Biblos paper, created with yellow and black carbon paper and an etching needle.

Summer in the Alps

Ink and watercolor.

Private work.

Family stories

The unfair division of housework.

Regretting motherhood.

Alpha Series

A series of linocuts based on a cycle of poems inspired by the countryside of Salamanca, Spain.

La Ventotissima Vera

Sketches & thingies

Porto Posters

Hand-drawn posters for some exhibitions at DE LICEIRAS 18 artist residency in Porto, Portugal.

Hill of Strangers

Hill of Strangers is an artist book inspired by my first visit to Granada, one of my favourite cities.

When I visited Granada last march, I immediately fell in love with this beautiful, magic, moorish city down in Andalucía. With its majestic castle towering over the old town of white houses with paradisiac gardens and pomegranates, the symbol of Granada, painted everywhere, it has a very particular atmosphere that is hard to find anywhere else in Europe. Hill of Strangers, recalling the ancient name of Granada, is inspired by this first encounter which hopefully wont be the last.

Hill of strangers was printed in a limited edition and is available here:

A children‘s guide to Vienna (2015)

A children's guide to Vienna. 2016. This guide is divided into eleven chapters (such as nature, health, entertainment), each of which is introduced with an illustration.

Client: Falter Verlag.

Vida Muerta

Vida muerta is an artist book made at Alfara Gráfica, inspired by the dying little village Encina de San Silvestre in the countryside of Salamanca, Spain. Aquaforte on offset plate, 6 pages, 9.8x7cm, Biblos / Hahnemühle Paper.Edition: 50

Stories from the Silkroad

Aquatint etchings based on sketches made during a journey through Uzbekistan.

Printed on Magnani, 2012/2013

Participant of the revolt

Hic sunt leones.

Blühn und Verwehn

La Cocina de América Latina

La Cocina de América Latina – stories, drawings and recipies from South America.

Vienna Tea Tin

Tea tin for Demmers Teehaus, a renowed Viennese tea house company, to create a tea tin with an illustrated map of Vienna on it. It shows the most important sights of Vienna, such as the Saint Stephen's Cathedral, Schönbrunn Palace and the Vienna Secession. The Vienna Tea (it's a very nice sencha green tea) is available in all their tea houses and in Demmer's online shop

Theory of nothing

Theory of nothing is an installation created during 10 days in August 2014 at the Old School Artist Residency in Gorna Lipnitsa, Bulgaria, where 10 artists of different fields and nationalities were individually working under the theme "Star rituals of the Thracians".

The Thracians were an ancient culture prevalent in the Balcans and Anatolia before being conquered by the Romans. They worshipped Zalmoxis, a allegedly student of Phytaghoras, and Orpheus. Believing that they were children of the Universe (the Great Mother Godess) , they also were convinced of their immortality. Herodotes called them "the most powerful people except the Indians".

The installation refers to the environment it was created in on several levels – it is inspired by the magical atmosphere of the village Gorna Lipnitsa, the cultural legacy of the old Thracians and Romans and their treasures hidden in the earth, as well as by the atmosphere in the Old School of Gorna Lipnitsa, a building virtually untouched since the end of the era of communism.

Based on the term "Theory of Everything", also known as "Final Theory", which refers to a theoretical framework of physics to fully explain all physical aspects of the Universe, the title of this project "Theory of nothing" hints at the fact that we are still in the dark when it comes to existential questions, and at the hope that this darkness might be lit by the stars and everything else we discover in our Universe.

The idea of the project was to create an imaginary astronomical laboratory, a kind of magician's workshop, or german "Hexenküche" (a witch's kitchen), with magical devices and mysterious objects and symbols, playing with the idea of how a fictive ancient culture, loosely based on the thracian culture, would have carried out their their star rituals.

The installation consists of paintings of several sizes, painted with acrylic paint on the yellowed paper of an old class book and playing with patterns of constellations and black holes as well as quotes from 1 Corinthians 13, a text on the subject of love, attributed to Paul the apostle (We see things as if in a mirror and I will know as I will be fully known), and from a short inscription carved onto a column of the ancient roman city of Nikopolis ad Istrum on the subject of enjoying life given the transience of everything (You have the day light).

Besides the paintings, the installation consists of painted didactic material found in the old school, such as a set of "ritual cards" painted with constellations of the summer sky and the zodiac signs of the participating artists as well as astronomical and thracian symbols, and a set of of painted instruments from physics classes turned into deformed celestial maps, an oil lamp painted with constellations, and bottles and test glasses used as containers for small paintings of constellations and black holes.

Objects of utility used for education were transformed into occult devices with unclear purpose for the spectator, just as many archaeological objects that we discover remain mysterious for us in their sense, and just as thracian priests used symbols and mathematical formulas for their rituals that uninitiated people would not understand.

Today just as in ancient Thracia, We still deal with the same fundamental questions of human existence. And although at this day and age we are about to lose our gods, we continue to look for answers in the sky.

The sky, having inspired questions and answers for mankind throughout history, keeps providing answers about the nature of our world, although we explore the universe in new ways, moving the focus from religion and mysticism to science. But at the same time, we still keep yearning for spiritual satisfaction.

Theory of nothing plays with this conflict of science and mysticism, of what we can explain and what still remains mysterious, which also involves the question of whether or not a theory of everything will be able to satisfy our spiritual needs, and to what extend we are looking for an enlightenment that has nothing to do with the mind, but rather with the soul.

Maps of Vienna and beyond

Client: Stadtzeitung Falter.

Foodcoops

Heurigen (wine taverns in fall)

Organic food

Feminism

Organic stuff

A Syrian refugee's odyssey

Swimming with children

Island maps: Zanzibar and Madagaskar

Personal work of dream destinations.

Postcards from Morocco

Postcards from Morocco is a postcard book I made when I lived and worked in Tangier, a city on the northern tip of Morocco located on the strait of Gibraltar, a colorful, dirty, somewhat overwhelming place full of smugglers, drop-outs, transients from sub-saharan Africa and other shady characters. Postcards from Morocco is a series of 12 illustrations that are excerpts of the life in Tangier and Morocco seen through the artist’s eyes, somewhere between real-life impressions and imagination, based on personal experiences, humourous anecdotes and observations of Morocco’s somewhat absurd everyday life beyond any 1001 nights cliché. The pictures tell stories about a strange, colorful world full of mint leaves and silver coffee pots, farewells at the strait of Gibraltar, stray cats, petit princes in the desert and false princes on the street, veiled faces and thieves in the night train, lots of embroidered oriental slippers, dangerous food and illiterates pretending to read the newspaper.